Hey? Listen! 3,000 dead soldiers ain't all that many for a four-year war, right?

Wow, after four years we have lost the same amount or less than we lost in single battles in former wars.

Thus was the argument expressed by some clown trool posting on Eschaton tonight.

The problem with this 'argument'--apart from its vicious inhumanity and appalling condescension-- is that it assumes that which is not yet, and perhaps may not be, decided.

The "sang froiders" (as I call them) case assumes that the combat in Iraq is worth fighting, for whatsoever reasons; that casualties were taken in an unexceptional cause: the line of duty, not unlike those incurred in other USer military adventures. The next phase in the rationale is to appeal to body count: "We're killin' 10 of them for everyone of them we lose. We'll win by attrition, if we just haang in there..."

What this position utterly denies even the existence of is not a contrary position. The counter-argument completely abnegates the ground for the sang froiders. This negation of the their hubris is the insistence of the immorality, a priori, of even one death in a war-of-opportunity, against a people which were not our foes, for reasons of basest personal and corporate ignomy.

It is NOT that deaths of 3000 USer soldiers--to say nothing of the maiming of countless thousands more--is 'too many' or 'comparably fewer than in previous wars,' or even that there were more murders in New Orleans.
We say one death in this immoral exercise in vicious, racist imperialism--one death by an American conqueror, one death by an innocent Iraqi child--is too many, is inexcusable, is intolerable, is outrageous, is criminal, is--in fact--treasonous.

This so-called war in the Mesopotamian desert so deeply violates the immemorial spirit of the founding of the country that it must be viewed as basest, foulest treachery and treason to those founding principles (no matter how shop-worn they've become with use and abuse), and should be treated as such, and excised--a very sharp knife is always best.

jeezis...